According to their Kickstarter page they will be receiving their first shipping containers from the manufacturer in China later this month. With that they will start sorting and packaging their products to ship out to the early backers. They have also announced that they were going to take a small amount of starter sets along with some rulebooks and faction sets to GenCon to display and sell to a limited number of people.

Now of course this had led to some outcry from their backers because they will not get their pledges before some people are able to purchase it at GenCon and as everyone knows there have been several delays in the release of the product to backers by several months. Palladium Books has acknowledged this concern on the Kickstarter page and are asking backers to vote whether to allow them to do this or not. It should be noted that any non-response will be considered a “yes”. It should be interesting to see how this will progress as we approach GenCon.

Since we will be there reporting, hopefully we can bring you up to date information. Are you a backer or fan of Robotech RPG Tactics?

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18 Comments

I’m a backer. And yes there have been delays. To be honest the delays don’t bother me so much. But the whiny approach that Palladium has taken with there reasons for delays is getting tiresome, and even unprofessional. As for them selling at Gencon, that doesn’t bother me since I know they need to push the game. What I don’t like is the way they have handled it. They are setting up the possibility of a disaster with the voting. Should never have down that. IMHO.

Not to disparage what is likely to turn out to be a fine product, but when all is said and done, I didn’t back this solely on the fact that Palladium Books and Kevin S. in particular were driving this. Nothing I’ve seen about this particular product development and release has surprised me, sadly.

There hasn’t been a single product in over a decade that has been released from that company that isn’t accompanied by some form of crisis that requires the fans to rally up and commit to a cause.

Kevin has a nasty habit of publically defending company failures and issues on ‘having to redo what a lazy freelancer sent me’, or ‘it just wasn’t perfect’, or ‘someone screwed us over’ or ‘I literally worked myself bloody because no one can do it like me’ … His “crisis of treachery” is still driving them to the brink, and that’s over half a decade ago.

I just feel bad about the people who are learning about the whining and the unprofessionalism 10 years too late, with a product and IP legacy that deserves so much more.

… I liked it better when it was called Macross p.s. the guy who created Macross also created Optimus Prime … so … legend basically … I have some “Valkyrie” model kits at home … they’re bigger then titans and they can transform ;P … pretty good for £20 ha ha

… oh, you mean about the delays ? ha ha I’m sure they know the situation, delays happen sometimes … anyway, I hear they are doing their own Robotech kickstarter right now, so they’re probably busy with that at the moment …

I remember seeing Pre-orders for this last year on Miniature Market! I can’t believe it’s not out yet! And people give Cool Mini or Not a hard time for being late! LOL having said that I love Robotech and the minis look cool so I guess once this initial backlash dies down we’ll see a pretty cool game!

Don’t give a crap about the KS being late, or the sales at Gencon. Will never get to gencon and everything that ships to AUS takes a while anyway. People need to get over themselves on this one, it is a KS and if you looked carefully at the KS while it was going there was very little manufactured/sample mini’s displayed, which spelt delays. It was obvious from the outset. Yeah, Palladium games couldn’t organize a F#@% in a brothel, but hey, why change 20 years of history in publishing? Again, it was an expected outcome for me, but the game looks good and they have taken care with the manufacturing so the product will be good from all accounts/pictures. I was in it for the game, not the company. And shit, I waited 20 years for Battletech to re-emerge, and that’s what I am in it for, the Battletech mini’s with a little bit of Robotech if I want a quick game. That is my take on this for what it is worth. If you put up money a little research is always wise.

Sure it’s always buyer beware, but from an ‘investor’ perspective … they asked for $70K to fund, and ended up with $1.4+ Million. That at least implies at some level that the KS started with an assumption by the management teams involved that $70K was what was needed to get the ball rolling. Obviously, this thing has gone gangbusters, so assuming that they needed even 10x as much to get going, that still leaves almost another $700,000 in ‘problem solving’ money.

I dunno, I can see why people are at least a bit miffed about what is going on, while Palladium simultaneously tries to convince people that the only way to make this game work is to dip into what should be KS stock and sell it at GenCon.

I didn’t back this one and didn’t play much attention to what they promised, but I doubt that is the case. By way of comparison, the other big minis KS that Ninja Division (in the form of Soda Pop) were involved in was Relic Knights. That asked for $20K, raised $900K, and turned out to be underfunded requiring Soda Pop to invest their own funds to make up the difference. Every stretch goal that unlocks something new adds cost and time to the project, every new backer who pledges in exchange for product adds cost and time to the project. Most campaigns run right at the margins of the cost which is why they can give such a good deal. That means as the funding total goes up there isn’t a corresponding increase in spare funds. If anything the percentage of spare funds can go down if a lid isn’t kept on things. This is what happened with Relic Knights.

I am in on this kickstarter and I don’t mind delays as it is par for the course. Selling KS stock however is a low blow for those who supported the project but if it happened it wouldn’t surprise me (looking at YOU Mr Siembada), it would just be disappointing.

I can understand the angst @vagrantwhisper, but it isn’t helping the situation with all the “hate mail” and complainers demanding answers. $700 000 may seem a lot , but I have some small experience dealing with the Chinese factories in the “toy” business, an believe me it is small takings. Other companies, such as a certain Wallymart tend to buy squ times on the lines, and they but big biscuits down to jump the que, putting small projects like this on the “back” burner with less experienced engineering staff. This combined with palladium, well hell, it just had to go wrong. Palladium also made it pretty clear with the way they spoke about the project that they didn’t “gear up” the staff to manage the process, typical Palladium style from years of annoying their customers. Yeah I am annoyed too, but really not surprised, and all they are trying to do is follow the American Business model of getting the thing to market at all costs, and don’t care who they burn in the process. This is why palladium is still a bit player in our industry after so many years and products with real potential, eg: Mechanoids, Recon and of course Macross. they are not dipping into KS stock as far as I can tell for the Gencon, but selling the excess stock they are receiving, probably some of the cancelled pledges. They have stated the KS stock will be in the process of being or have been shipped by the time of Gencon.

“they are not dipping into KS stock as far as I can tell for the Gencon, but selling the excess stock they are receiving, probably some of the cancelled pledges. They have stated the KS stock will be in the process of being or have been shipped by the time of Gencon”

Not quite true – They stated in the initial update that started this storm that they would be receiving the stock in several containers and would be taking 200 copies from the first one to take to GenCon, so this is clearly stock initially tagged for KS backers that they have decided to use to (try to) pump up interest at the last big gaming convention of the US calender. So that’s 200 backers who could have had their rewards sent out of the first delivery Palladium receive, but will have to wait for the next one instead, and so on down the chain.

This whole thing wouldn’t have been quite so galling if they hadn’t told us prior to the KS ending that the project was 90% complete, kept telling us stuff looked great and then made the claim they would start shipping in December last year. Next thing we get is a whole lot of silence then an update spelling out a litany of problems that, if they had kept backers informed of, we’d have let slide but they chose to keep secret and spin a line to us instead.

And the lack of any comment on how they plan to fulfill international orders (of which I’m one) at this late stage, is equally worrying……

I’m a big believer in Kickstarter stuff happening when it happens, I can wait for my Unseen minis (might have got a bit caught up in the campaign excitement and funded too much!), but the excuses and finger pointing since the KS ended bums me out a little.

I seem to remember that this KS ran at a similar time to Deadzone, I need to remember that I should always go Mantic if I have an option in the future!

My only complaint about this situation is the idea that Silence is consent for them. They stated that anyone who does not vote at all, is saying yes to them selling the product at Gencon. That is kind of crap…